Setting the Setting

[JadedDemiGod]

Hi all, Names Ian im a little new (ok first time) but i like the place so ill give it a shot. Im currently working on a Science Fiction P&P RPG, im trying to go for a gritty and realistic futuristic world (plus a space opera feel) and im curious if you guys have any suggestions when it comes to setting the setting?

[Eero Tuovinen]

If you don't have any particular inspiration for the setting yourself, consider making the game setting-less. Also make a point of providing tools for setting-creation, and you'll have a powerful tool in your hands.

[Abkajud]

What are your mechanics? A little more information on what your game's about would be helpful, if you want feedback ^_^

The setting can be whatever you want, but think about this: do the rules make the setting matter, or are the two more or less totally separate? Do the rules apply in some central ways to having a space opera game, or are they "universal", or at least not sci-fi-specific?

[JadedDemiGod]

Basicly the setting is set in the future (obviously), i wanted an Epic Universe feel.

This is a rough storyline unfortunatly i left my notes at home and im out of town.

Cliff notes:

The Story begins in the year 2012 when the earths poles shifts causing electronics to fail and mass hysteria, panic, and a whole host of other disasters as humanity falls into a darkage. Follow up roughly 30 years later an Orginization known as the United Planet of Earth Republic is formed and uses their Technological Advancments to Unite the earth and bring humanity out of the dark age that is had fallen into.

As time advances humanity designs its first FTL drive (the creators name was Adrian Storm), It makes first contact with an alien race known as the Fae (nickname), They make advances in both genetics and cybernetics, Psionics is found to be a real phenomenon, and a variety of wars are fought within U.P.E space including a civil war when the United Terran Confederation is formed (human Supremacist group). Also the U.P.E adds several alien races to its charter as allies.

Roughly around 2177 the U.P.E is involved in its first intergalactic war with a race known as the Krissh. This war lasts for 40 years before the SilverStar Federation meets with representatives from the U.P.E to negotiate an alliance to beat back the Krissh-Ral'na Empire. A Cease fire agreement is signed on the neutral planet of Eskaria.

The game itself takes place 200 years later, when the galaxy becomes a powder keg of hostility as Unknown forces begin attacking all the different galactic organizations, and everyone points fingers at everyone.

Players play as one of many people in the galaxy, From a soldier fighting for one of the Many different organizations to a Psionic Mystic.

So that is a rough draft, and theirs a lot more to it, im still working on it.

In regards to the system their are no classes or anything like that, its a Point based system based off of the D20 system. I'm currently working on a leveless system for it, though its only on the pre-Alpha stage.

[Luke]

Classic. The action of the game takes place so long after the fun important stuff that everyone who was involved with the fun important stuff is dead and everyone who is alive doesn't care any more. Where's the fun in that?

Sorry to be harsh, but I've read dozens and dozens of settings like yours that have The Formative Cool Event, but the players can't be a part of it or have any stake in it because The Event Happens In the Distant Past. Why?

There's nothing original or interesting in your rough storyline.

Why not have all of those events happen on the heels of one another? Why don't the players make veterans of the First War, now being unwillingly thrust into this knew conflict of uncertain proportions?

And just to make you think:
Why is this in space? Why doesn't this take place at sea on sail boats? (Hint: "Because space is cool" is the wrong answer.)

And if you're going to make this in space anyway:
Have you read the Larry Niven's Kzin Wars stuff?
Have you read Haldeman's Forever War?
Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky?
Banks' Culture novels?

[dindenver]

Ian,
  One thing that fascinates me about world history is the anarchy that follows a major war. Look at the wild west. It arose from the aftermath of the Civil War. Both sides trained, armed and mobilized all these men. And when the war was over, not all of them disarmed and settled down again. Same goes for Japan after the Meiji restoration. Large groups of armed men with nothing to do, its a volatile mix.

  Maybe, that idea can punch up your setting a little?

  Also, I think mysterious aliens in RPGs do not work out well. I mean, you are going to have to provide the GM with guidelines as to how they work (mechanics-wise) and once this is done, it is no longer a mystery, is it?

  From your Cliff Notes version, it is hard to tell if the UPE is an Earth organization or alien. Seems like it is founded on Earth. But if that is the case, why are they advanced technologically and the rest of the world is banging rocks against each other to start a fire?

  The name United Planet of Earth seems awkward to me. And making the Confederation racist seems to me to be cliche and insulting to people from southern USA.

  40 years of war does not ring true to me. With faster than light travel, and presumably, faster than light communication and the massive firepower (both technological and psionic), it seems like one side would be pushed to the breaking point pretty quickly. I realize that there are multiple planets involved and there would be many more soldiers to rally and/or lose, but I just don't think that there would be enough to survive 40 years of high tech bloodshed, you know?

  Finally, I like how you have setup the impetus for a lot of great plot hooks. I wouldn't take Luke's criticism too harshly. You need a good mix of things happened then (that's why X hates Y, etc.) and things happening now.

  I think Epic-ness comes from the scale of power(s) involved (can you save the world, solar system, galaxy, etc.). You are close to this. You just need to figure out how to make sure that the PCs are in the middle of it all, right? Maybe don't be afraid to make the PC politically or militarily powerful. A player in the stakes of these conflicts, you know?

[JadedDemiGod]

Just setting a message up here so people dont think im not reading the responses. Currently working on stuff, ill put an actual response in a bit.

And thanks for the feedback, real quick, the reason its set in space is because i want to go for a futuristic setting in space, not "because its cool" as you put it but because i wanted to design a game using these elements. Originally because i wanted a Science fiction game that i would actually want to play, in my 15+ years of gaming i have not found a game that adequately defines what i want.

If anyone should mention star wars my main complaint is people always want to play Jedi and if your not a force user you are greatly under powered. And should someone mention rifts i want a game without magic. i mention and use these mainly because they are the most commonly mentioned for Science Fiction games along with a variety of others that are less well mentioned.

Anyway ill post more if people are still willing to critique and ill take your suggestions under note.

Thanks again for the critique.

[Luke]

the reason its set in space is because i want to go for a futuristic setting in space, not "because its cool" as you put it but because i wanted to design a game using these elements.

What are "these elements?"

-L

[Matt Wilson]

Hi Ian:

Keep working on your setting. Something is grabbing you, so stick with it. That's my best feedback. The rest is highly disposable...

As you can see from Luke's strong reaction, the stuff that's cool to you isn't quite translating yet. Keep working on it and see what comes out. I'd suggest focusing your setting mostly on "what's happening right now" rather than what happened way back when. It's easy to think about setting in terms of causality (how did we get here, what led to this?) but you might need a lot less of that than you think. A small number of crazy people read the Silmarillion, and the rest of us just watched the movies and had a good time.

The reason you want to think about space adventure vs. age-of-sail is that in the latter, people have a common frame of reference. I know what a sailing ship looks like, kinda, and that there were cannons and muskets and those cool admiral hats and so on. In space, it's anyone's guess. So if you need to bring me up to speed on how the Blarglezop drive works, then that's even more setting I have to read.

I'd say keep making the game, and occasionally go back and look at your setting and ask yourself, "could they play without this info?" If the answer is yes, maybe you cut it. It will be a sad moment, but then you might say, yeah, that was a good move.

[Adam Dray]

I think you need to ask yourself what purpose the setting serves for your game. Who does it serve?

If you think that the setting is supposed to be a grand canvas to inspire the players and get them into the groove for their own awesome stories, then how does your setting do that?

There's an old adage that game setting creators (designers and GMs) are just frustrated authors. Seriously, if you want to write stories, consider writing fiction (and not fiction for the game).

I love gripping game settings. I love pole-shifting Earth stuff. I read Rand Flem-Ath Atlantis mythology stuff. Love it. I love first contact stories. Have you read much Arthur C. Clarke? The idea of humanity meeting all these alien races is awesome. But as Luke pointed out in his lovable way, that's all over now and the players don't get to interact with it.

Rewind your setting. A timeline of potential events is much cooler, since the player characters get to be the movers and shakers then. They get to figure out how to survive as the world spins off its axis. They get to negotiate with (or assassinate) world leaders to forge a united Earth. They get to be on the first contact team and determine if these aliens are friendly or hostile. They get to deal with the burgeoning problems of psionics and cybernetics.

Another problem I see in your setting description is one of scale. You want an epic SF setting, but all of your ideas are very Earth-centric. To me, an epic SF setting spans thousands of star systems, has vast empires, and must deal with long travel distances. I imagine some kind of Classical Roman political structure, with local governors. Earth could be the Rome of that Empire, but why should it be? Why are humans even in charge here? If humankind brought technology to the other aliens, then the first contact stories could be us going to them, and that'd be different and interesting. If aliens came to Earth, then we're behind the curve technologically and most likely Earth is just some backwater planet in some other race's empire.  If you want all this focus on humanity and Earth, then really consider dropping the "epic" scale, or do some hard thinking about the consequences of the choices you're making.

One interpretation of "epic" is that the players play bit parts in a huge galaxy and are swept along in the tide of events bigger than them. This isn't fun for me or for a lot of other people. You know what I think is awesome? Making decisions as a player that change the fictional universe my character lives in. In "epic" play, that means that characters are movers and shakers, so they're probably not low-ranking soldiers or nobody-mystics and they're probably not running around in a group of five or six people on a ship. Epic characters are generals, planetary governors, heads of religions, and so on. Leaders. And they interact over huge distances and make decisions that affect billions of people. That's epic.

Another way to go is to rewind your history and have the characters be exceptional but still somewhat ordinary people in tough situations at the right time. Given a list of events that could occur (but might not when player characters make history), run the players through these seminal events in galactic history. Maybe they play different characters in each scenario. They're the UN disaster planning team during the Earth's axial shift. They're the first contact team (or the aliens, hell yeah). They're the United Earth negotiators. They're a bunch of soldiers at a critical battle. Each scenario will make history, win or lose. History gets created as the players play.

If you don't want to give players that much control over "the story," then seriously consider writing your story as fiction instead of gaming it. Your players will thank you.

[lachek]

Howdy, Ian!

Here's the best advice I can give you on setting creation:

• Consider what you want the players to do at the table. Your game should have one or a few default modes of play - in D&D, that might be critter-killing, for example. Sure, you can have courtly intrigue in D&D as well, but it's not its default mode, you know what I mean?
• Consider how you want the players to play that default mode (by talking, by shouting, by rolling dice, by doing arithmetic, etc). What does play actually look like from the outside, and how does it feel from the inside? In most D&D sessions, play might look like a board game from the outside, but might feel like a blood-splattering awesome fictional combat on the inside.
• Think of fictional situations where your game might let your players do the activities above and fulfill the default modes of play in a really awesome way. For example, if you want the players to be killing lots and lots of space bugs by rolling huge numbers of dice, you need several possible situations that make that happen frequently.
• Now, and only now, construct a setting which makes those situations evident. Leave out details that aren't important to create those situations - the more you allow players and other groups to fill in those details with things that interest them in play, the more interesting the game will be for them.
• It's evident from the above, but remember that setting is not important as a stand-alone thing - it is a means to an end, where the end is a good play session - in whatever form that play session takes.

Best of luck.

[Lance D. Allen]

Ian,

Something to consider about setting- especially grand, involved, details-heavy setting- is the people who will be playing in it. It's been my experience that a lot of the time, the players won't read the book cover to cover. They won't read your setting bible. By and large, they're more interested in how they can make a given character concept with your setting interfering as little as possible. If your setting encourages that concept, and helps make it even cooler, then awesome. But it's gonna take the setting enthusiast (most commonly the GM) to let them know that.

Why is that? Because your setting doesn't matter that much. It's a hundred pages of text written like a badly edited history book. It may be that your setting really, truly sings.. But they're not going to know that until they invest the time, and they're not going to invest the time until they have a damned good reason to.

The most important thing with setting is to make it accessible. Allow the players to get the important parts of setting in easy, bite-sized pieces. The parts of setting that are there to make their characters shine are what they want. The GM will probably read much more of the setting, but all they really need are the parts  necessary to build situations to put the characters in.

So all of that badass history? Put it in a folder and mark it "LATER". Read Iachek's advice closely, and think about the situation at the table. What are the players going to be doing in a typical-yet-awesome session of your game? Write the amount of setting necessary to make that happen. Stick the rest on a blog, or if the game sells well, into a setting book to be sold later. Believe me, if people enjoy the game, they'll come around to reading your setting eventually.

[JadedDemiGod]

Hey all thanks for all the advice, im currently working on my game and your advice has helped me alot. have to say i like this site, even the criticism is well written and helpful which is a change from most. Thanks again, ill put an update when im done let you guys take a look if you want and let me know what you think.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky?

Curse you Crane, with your excellent recommendations!

Ian, what are your favorite pieces of science fiction? What are you trying to do with this game that you haven't been able to do with other games?

[JadedDemiGod]

My Favorite pieces of science fiction would be: Star Trek, Star wars, Fire fly, Along with a lot of Spider Robinson's books, Dune (all of the series), Starship troopers, Solaris and a couple other books i cant think of off the top of my head.

I dunno im trying to go for a particular feel, kinda hard to describe. I just haven't found it yet, and ill know it when i find it. Sorry if that wasn't to clear, but i just know what im looking for, and im trying to make it instead of looking through a hundred different RPG's.

Make sense?